While this would certainly put an end to the poor siting problems discovered by the surfacestations.org project, I can’t help but think almost everything related to climate can be solved with money:
Here’s the letter:
PDF with attachments here: USHCN_Letter_-_FINAL_-_7-29-10_SECURED
I also can’t help thinking of this image when 100 MILLION DOLLARS is used:
Now don’t get me wrong, I support a modernized network, but $100 million? That’s a bit steep.
It works out to $100,000 per weather station.
When I visited NCDC in April 2008…
Day 2 at NCDC and Press Release: NOAA to modernize USHCN
…they told me the USHCN-M cost was supposed to be around $25,000 per weather station.
Which looking at the USHCN-M equipment below, allowing for government inflation, sounds about right:
USHCN-M station at Greensboro, AL
But $100K a piece for what you see above? I don’t think so.
See: What the modernized USHCN will look like
Hell, I’ll do it for 10K a piece and do a better job than NOAA ever could.
h/t to Joe D’Aleo
How do we get historic temperature trends from all these new sites?
That is alot of “station move adjustments” and recalculated “homogeneity adjustments” and new super computer programs to do all the “adjustments” and, viola, massive global (US) warming.
There must a limit to just how cynical a person can get but obviously I haven’t reached it yet in this area – more to come later I guess.
Yeah but for government work that’s pretty cheap.
Sure, they could almost certainly do it cheaper. But unfortunately Government tends to find the most expensive way to not accomplish what it intends to do.
The private sector tends to seek the cheapest way to accomplish something, and accidentally ends up accomplishing more than it even intended to, in a positive way that is. Unfortunately I don’t think there is a market for climate monitoring, so this remains in the government responsibility area. Which means it will be expensive and not work right.
Is that really the best we can do?
tallbloke says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:04 pm
Steven mosher says:
September 21, 2010 at 4:34 pm
100 bucks per hour.
Blimey.
—
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. At $100/hr, are they getting Peterson and Karl to do some manual labor? (That IS an amusing thought…).
In any case, $100 million is an awful lot of money for just 2% of the Earth’s surface (as Jimbo Hansen likes to point out). They could install much cheaper equipment and just “homogenize” and “correct” the data like they do now…
richard verney, if they can’t use any of the existing records they’ll just have to use computer simulations until the brand new sites have collected 100 years of data.
@Djozar says: @September 21, 2010 at 1:19 pm
“1000 Weather stations – $25,000,000
Cost of 1000 employees surfing web for 10 years – $75,000,000
Ability to claim additional stimulus jobs – Priceless”
Very good. One can tell from the number of wounded trolls on this thread how accurate that comment was.
Nah. Just stick it right next to a house. Much cheaper. Then you can spend the money on bogus polar bear reports.
Have you done the analysis? $100 million over ten years for a group that size + the equipment installs doesn’t sound all that unreasonable to me. What Mosh said.
According to the AGW promotion community, the stations are producing highly reliable data.
There for it would be a waste, in these times of budget pressure, to spend any money on this perfect system.
Well and good from here on, perhaps, but what of the data already collected over decades? Will we have to wait for a few decades more to gain enough new data to discern global warming/climate change/climate disruption, to use the latest buzz phrase?
I guess the heat’s off until new data replace the old (pun intended!).
remember, they will have to install solar panels so they can operate at night…
/sarc off…
Bill Illis says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:34 pm
How do we get historic temperature trends from all these new sites?
See the CRN. basically you have overlapping periods. so with CRN they have a pristine station, with say 7 years of data ( last I checked, they have published on this) and you look at the correlation of the new with the old. The assumption being that if they track well from say 2000 to 2010 that you can splice them together. Of cou
However if the new site showed .1C warming from 2000 to 2010 and the old nearby site showed .3C warming or 0C warming, then they would have an issue.
of course people will have issues with splicing but if the data support it and you want an estimate of the past, its the only way to estimate.
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. At $100/hr, are they getting Peterson and Karl to do some manual labor? (That IS an amusing thought…).
100 bucks an hour. ever had your car fixed? or washing machine.
do you know what a wrap rate is?
http://fedbiztips.net/blog/entry/55691/do-you-know-your-cost-structure
basically, its the true cost of the employees labor.
you may pay the employee 30 dollars an hour or 60K per year.
To that hourly rate you “wrap” in all the other costs.
Does that employee have a boss? a manager who does not charge the government
on this contract? say he earns 200K per year. thats 100 per hour. Say he has 3
employees. each of them has to charge 60 per hour to pay the overhead on their labor. do you give them a 401K, that gets added. do you give them health, life insurance, pension. These are all allowed costs that are “wrapped” into the base labor rate. So, when you sell the government (Noaa) labor you bid a wrapped rate.
so 100 bucks per hour is NOT what the employee GETS, its what the business has to charge to make money on the labor. It is all regulated by a giant ass book called the FAR. And if you want to sell to the government you have to comply with the FAR which means you get to wrap your overhead charges ( secretaries, managers, buildings, vacations, IR&D, pensions, medical etc, bid and proposal work, etc) into your labor cost.
AND when you sell equipment to the government that too comes with its wrap rate.
and your profit margin is fixed. and fully disclosed.
I’ve worked at places with wrap rates of 3X
here is the average for the IT sector from TRW
http://www.ardak.com/competitor_rates.html
about 2.2X
software engineers
http://www.linux.com/learn/whitepapers/doc/4/raw
2.4X
so, If I were a scientist like Karl making say 75 per hour, that would be burdended up to at least 150 per hour if not 200 per hour.
Most consultants I know charge 400 per hour, wrapped. they dont put 400 per hour in their pocket. Its what they have to charge to put 100 per hour in their pocket.
and now you understand a little bit more about cost accounting and the FAR.
yikes that was years ago
Off-topic apology, but this one is too good to miss… possibly climate quote of teh week material:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/wind-and-fliud-dynamics-may-have-parted-red-sea-for-moses/story-e6frg6so-1225927841954
Yes climate modelling used to argue the case for Moses parting the Red Sea… I kid you not. It ain’t April 1st somewhere is it? Is this you tax dollars hard at work?
REPLY: Ah thanks, I saw that earlier today and was working on the writeup when you posted this.- Anthony
Who needs stations? All that is needed are bigger MegaComputer Clusters. As far as the GCM is concerned, the heat is rising at the processor level.
Long time reader of the site. Keep up the good work. Work in a creative industry and have been the only skeptic in the office …. until today. One co-worker now has seen enough to say he was wrong and others are definitely wavering. I couldn’t be happier. Even the former true believers just don’t wanna talk about it anymore. Their arguments are getting less and less …. “sustainable.”
Andrew says:
E.M.Smith says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:18 pm
I will happily install 2 stations per year for $200,000. Just send my first $100,000 and I’ll get right on it. With luck, I’ll raise the rate to 4 per year just after the first 2 are installed ….
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the installation cost as I noted is 20Million Over 10 years. that is 2Million per year
for 100 stations per year. that is 20000 per station. Now, I imagine that includes whatever labor and tools are necessary to prepare the site, and bring the system on line and test it. And are you prepared to change your accounting system so that you comply with the FAR?
Mike Haseler says: September 21, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Man says: September 21, 2010 at 12:37 pm
“Seriously, if a Net Community were to attack this problem, what would it look like and how much would it cost”
If a net based community were to attack this problem then … it would look like the shambles they call wikipedia … full of in fighting, petty politics data that cannot be trusted by anyone least of all those involved. All it all a total waste of time for all concerned!
I don’t know what you have in mind, but there already exists a volunteer network for rain and snow, with manual web data entry nation-wide. It is the Community Collaborative Rain hail & Snow Network (CoCoRaHS). They are shooting for 20,000 observers by the end of 2010. The observer provides their own guage.
Here: http://www.cocorahs.org/
Steven mosher says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:41 pm
“the problems with a net based community approach would be a nightmare for anyone analyzing/auditing the data either now or 25 years from now.”
Maybe, but there could be an agreed upon set of standards that could be imposed and enforced. It would take a lot of the contention out. Perhaps the IEEE could help?
James Sexton says:
September 21, 2010 at 6:05 pm
Nick says:
September 21, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Hey,what Steve Mosher says. Stress again,this is over a ten year period….and yes,if you want to improve the infrastructure,you need money.
========================================================
Yes, but, not that much. Ideally, these people have actually identified what was wrong and where. (Else, where did they come up with that figure?)
If you know what is wrong, what does it take to fix it? It isn’t that every station needs relocated. Some only need upgraded materials. As Steve Mosher says, there are considerable expenses involved in lodging and transport, but done properly, one could hit 3-4/day, depending upon the task.
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without knowing the locations ahead of time you cannot optimize the logistics. If you planned ( dreaming) that you could optimize the travel, then if you could NOT, you would have to eat the difference. if you predict 1500 per trip, under a FFP contract that is all you can spend. so the difference comes out of pocket. If you underspend you can also get in trouble. because your profit is limited by law.
A million dollars for 10 thousand worth of site improvements sounds about right. The Department of Commerce has overhead to cover. ( a large part of the CIA funds come from the departments of agriculture and commerce) Have you done work for the government. I have, you have to charge 3 times the normal price to cover the extra overhead of the paperwork and special demands in all government contracts that have nothing to do with the needs of the job. pg
I think you are all missing the point – I see that one Scientist is saying that the new data adjustment homogenizer, is the best there is to detect and show climate change. So that work is done and dusted on that say so and now if we just make the replacement program so high in cost the politicians will baulk at the prospect of spending that sort of money then business adjustment agenda as usual.
Conversely if they opt to provide it. Lots of new data, but lots of time to invent excuses, we didn’t do it, don’t blame us it was the old equipment see!! (the honorable escape route – blame the tools !!) (you know the instruments, not us!!)
Whatever happened with rational minds – you can parralel a random number of new sites and effectively check and verify the temperature trends against the others and use that to bring into effect an orderly replacement program.
Most of the cost of maintaining is already there with the old systems now – perhaps in a double blind experiment the Surface Stations Org project team could recommend and re-site the worst UH affected sites and assist in the random selection of new representative sites.
Proper way to do things and disarm your skeptical critics (maybe!!)
Hmmnn.
And the other thing to consider is that whoever did the budget request had data, real cost data, on building up the CRN. Typically, that data would be controlling and anybody in the budget office reviewing the budget request would go over it with a fine toothed comb. There would a full schedule, head counts, average labor rates, review meetings programmed, blah blah blah, AND if you want to sell your services to the government you have to abide by their aquisition rules or you cannot bid. So, you might think you can do the work your way, but that is not what they are buying. They are buying the work done THEIR way. And you have to prove that you can do it their way. do it their way. and then document that you did it their way and be subject to audit that you did it their way. Oh, and if, for example, you have employees in some cases they have to fill out a time card in 1/4 hour increments, and keep the time card visible for inspection at all times. At least that is what I had to do.
So you cant do “it” cheaper, because doing “it” means doing “it” their way. of course we can all think of ways to do “it” cheaper, but the government is not buying your innovative ways. they are buying it the way they bought it yesterday, and the day before that.
If you want to build a better mousetrap, your way and try to sell them something better, cheaper, etc. then I would suggest an unsolicited proposal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-20_Tigershark
1.2 Billion was alot of money then. but we knew better than customer. ha.
P.G. Sharrow says:
September 21, 2010 at 8:29 pm
A million dollars for 10 thousand worth of site improvements sounds about right. The Department of Commerce has overhead to cover. ( a large part of the CIA funds come from the departments of agriculture and commerce) Have you done work for the government. I have, you have to charge 3 times the normal price to cover the extra overhead of the paperwork and special demands in all
#########
yep. for a smallish business the wrap rates can be 3X. like I said at one small company I worked with the wrap rate was 3.12 bigger companies have it easier since the added overhead gets amortorized over more labor hours. hence the TRW numbers around 2.2X
James
Maybe, but there could be an agreed upon set of standards that could be imposed and enforced. It would take a lot of the contention out. Perhaps the IEEE could help?
########
the issue isnt the standards. The issue would be compliance and audit. just for starters. And the system (like CRN) has to supply reliable data for decades.
just think about the problem of incorporation new data into the old system. after 10 years of the new system supplying data you can start to correlate it to the old and adjust as needed. So any net based approach would have to have people committed to 10 years of supplying data.
James: I have a great idea boss, we can get people to supply data over the net.
BOSS: will the promise 10 years of data?
James: err you mean a contractual obligation?
Boss: yes, thats the goal of the program, to build a new system that can be
matched to the old system and carry on as old stations go out of service.
James: err, like a real contract?
Boss: yes, I have to be able to represent that this is low risk and we can be held
accountable. we need guranteed success. Im a federal worker. I want this
gig till I get my fat pension.
James: oh, so be very safe and conservative..
Boss: ya, unless you like the weather in alaska, I suggest you be boring and safe.
not like the commercial world at all.
How about doubling the cost and hardwiring ALL of the sites to a central point to which the data is delivered absolutely independent of human handling. The central box then spits out the data while concurrently archiving it in itself in a permanent database no one can alter, Read Only!
More expensive, but so much better!